Genomewide diversity in the Levant (Haber et al. 2013) – “Our results show recent genetic stratifications in the Levant are driven by the religious affiliations of the populations within the region…. Levant populations today fall into two main groups: one sharing more genetic characteristics with modern-day Europeans and Central Asians, and the other with closer genetic affinities to other Middle Easterners and Africans.” – @dienekes’.

Feet on the Autism Spectrum – “Psychotherapist Cary Terra works with adults with autism spectrum disorder…. Over many years, she’s noticed what she calls an ‘unmistakable trend’: that her patients have a tendency to sit with their feet stacked.” – *hbd chick looks down* – oops!

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I’m not sure about the blue gods. Intelligence measured through vocabulary and belief in God as the only measure of religion? There was a study from Edinburgh in 2011 that used a composite IQ test and a six dimensional measure of religion on a large sample of adults (better than children). It found measures of religiousness correlating from zero to -0.13.

But somehow the studies of lower quality showing that religious people are stupid get all the attention.

I’m surprised the WIERD researchers aren’t being pilloried. They must have hedged their ideas very carefully because it still seems that wherever they talk about “culture” you could simply insert “biology” or “genes” and reach very similar conclusions about the sheer levels of difficulty (if not impossibility) of running a multi-ethnic state.

FTA:

People are not “plug and play,” as he puts it, and you cannot expect to drop a Western court system or form of government into another culture and expect it to work as it does back home.

Or, mutatis mutandis , you cannot expect to drop another culture into a Western court system or form of government and expect it to work, either.

And a commenter in the WEIRD thread dropped this quote from an earlier paper by the researchers:

“A third possibility is that some population variability originates from a process known as gene-culture coevolution (9). Although challenging to demonstrate conclusively, a growing research ﬁeld is showing that human cultural practices directly alter parts of the human genome; the domestication of large milk-producing mammals, for instance, appears to have led to changes in gene frequencies coding for adult lactose absorption. A similar coevolutionary process may lurk behind some
psychological differences, and this is an intriguing possible subject for future research.”–Norenzayan, 2011, “Explaining human behavioral diversity”

I think we have some thought criminals on our hands. I’ve already contacted HuffPo.

re: from they are not us: “more than 96 percent of the subjects tested in psychological studies from 2003 to 2007 were Westerners—with nearly 70 percent from the United States alone. . .” (most of whom are college undergraduates he he).

The article “We Aren’t the World” was a great discussion on how much we do not know about peoples around the world because of the bias towards doing research on WEIRD people. Unfortunately, it’s not as good of an introduction on the topic as I’d like because it mentions how the researchers were convince that the differences they observed were not genetic (a priori, I might add). Not only is this scientifically unsound to declare this outright, one has to bend over backwards to imagine how these rather significant differences in cognitive abilities could not be genetic. I have to say being able to imagine some of these environment-only explanations is rather impressive.

Re: Average IQ in Jamaica – as per my comment on Steve Sailer’s post, it’d be interesting to see if the rest of Lynn’s estimates for average Caribbean IQs turn out to be underestimates. Malloy’s findings, for me at least, call into question the validity of Lynn’s numbers in his latest book.

Re: Feet on the Autism Spectrum – if by “stacked” they mean “feet crossed” then I’m guilty at times – especially when riding the subway…

“Heine and others suggest that such differences may be the echoes of cultural activities and trends going back thousands of years.”
And perhaps, just possibly, these activities and trends influenced reproductive fitness in ways that have reinforced these behaviors in the population at large through changes in gene frequencies.

Psychology and economics seem to me the fields where cultural influences will be strong – it would be interesting to do the “ultimatum game” experiment on people of a single ethnic group in different environments – say Japanese in Japan, in the U.S., in Brazil, in Russia, and in a European country with enough Japanese businessmen to have a pool to select a few people from. Or West Africans in Nigeria, in a not-badly-run African country, in the U.S., in Haiti, in Cuba, in Puerto Rico, and in France. I expect that while you might find racial differences, you’ll also find within-race differences based on cultural environment.

@georgia resident – “And perhaps, just possibly, these activities and trends influenced reproductive fitness in ways that have reinforced these behaviors in the population at large through changes in gene frequencies.”

@nelson – “it’d be interesting to see if the rest of Lynn’s estimates for average Caribbean IQs turn out to be underestimates.”

yes. jason’s numbers for jamaica seem more right — and seem more right for the caribbean on the whole. i mean, the caribbean is kinda dysfunctional, but it’s not that dysfunctional (except for haiti, unfortunately).